Another potentially unbalancing factor in MMORPGs is the initial wealth of newbies - I have no idea whether this is the case in any existing games, but there''s certainly the potential for a situation where, for example, a player can gain a noticeable advantage by a sort of "twinking lite" where you generate a number of characters and pool their starting resources.

There''s also the problem of situations like the one mentioned in the griefing thread where some people turned a profit by buying poison and getting newbies to drink it, then cashing their assets...

A more subtle problem is the potential for a growth economy to come into being based around the constant influx of wealth from newbie characters... once the supply of newbies begins to dry up, you''d get a situation like with Gold Rush towns in the American West - once the local gold mines played out, the towns built around the prospecters'' money became ghost towns in short order. I don''t think this is very likely in a game, but a misbalanced economy could suffer either as a result of the newbie cash stream, or as a result of it ending. Of course, the simplest solution is to give the newbie as little as possible, and make that little effectively worthless.

Just a little more for people to consider/ignore

Great topic.

Im working on a Mud, based on Elite.
Just as Elite you will be using a cargoship and trade a lot of the time.
But in our game, you can also mine basic resources and if you have a planet/space station you can refine some materials too.

Not only will we have different ores and materials, but also a relative purity/quality indicator which can increase or decrease the value of your goods.
Heck, perhaps a good idea to do it with all the stuff.

Lets face it, in space stuff deteriorates just like here.
Under fire and constant battle even more so :-)

How to balance this however and are there any good articles for game economy (google gave me a lot of dry academic stuff about economy)

Thank you for any awnsers you might have

Why not add constants to the factor.
Too much money in the world? Fix it a constant value.
Too much equipment in the world? Fix it a constant value.

For money, make it so that there can be only so much money in the world. Then, force those wealthy man to spend their money. Either through food, or rental when they go offline/save/log off/whatever. Force them to maintain their equipment. Give equipment lifespan. Allow repairs on them, but degrade the quality. Create repo mobs(repossession mobs) that spring up and demand certain equipments back when they start to become too common.

Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming Discussion, Design and Development



[edited by - dot on December 31, 2002 1:32:43 PM]

I think your answers lie in the basics of our real world economy. The world we live has a finite amount of resources. Some of them are very valuable as forms of currency (platinum, gold, silver, etc.), some of them are valuable in non-fiscal ways (uranium, water, etc.) and most of them are not very valuable at all (dirt, rock, etc.). Once you have defined your world (size, capacity, etc.), you can then set a finite number of resources within the world. Every player-made, creature-made or developer-made item must deduct from the world''s resource count. As new and better items are created, they affect the value of older items. Use supply-and-demand economics. I''m not saying all this is easy, but I think everyone is trying too hard to create a new economy that''s better or more realistic than our real world economy... and you can''t get more real than the real thing.

You might wanna observe what happens in a designer controlled environment in real life : Magic the Gathering and other successful card games.
Simply put, each new season, the developpers create new styles of play that will usually make the previous uber-deck obsolete, or at least they create such an alternative that players feel the pull of the new wave and usually a global switch of decks occurs (that, plus the tournament league make the "broken" cards illegal for tournaments).

I know it might seem a bit far stretched from your question, but I think the logic and problematic is the same than in the problem of MMORPG. Maybe it''s worth a look. Oh, and another extremely succesful CCG is Legen Of the Five Rings. Interestingly, both games use plot drive to steer game mechanics one way or another (Magic only started having some sort of "plot drive" since Urza''s Saga, but the effects are dramatic on the game, in a good way IMHO, both gameplay wise and money wise for the creators).
L5R was story driven since the beginning, and simply hooked the players with it''s brilliant narrative, which I guess is less useful to you... but you never know

Sancte Isidore ora pro nobis !

quote: Original post by SpittingTrashcan
The only commodity of real value in an MMORPG is experience, which cannot be bought or sold.

I digress: the only commodity of real value in an MMORPG is experience AND it should be bought and sold. Creating an economy using media is a very functional approach to the problem. After all, it is a mediated experience that the game player is after.

The question is: are games complex enough to generate interesting/useful media for distribution?

Some good points here made, but the solutions really haven''t been looked into very much here.

Symptom: Game worlds get too much money, as the game world continues, everyone ends up rediculously rich and items that were rediculously expensive before are now commonplace and on the weakest of n00bs.

Problem: Creatures that used to be difficult at x level of power are now easy at x*.75 level of power.

Solutions: Now this is where it gets interesting and these are only some of the solutions that I can think of.

1) Wear and tear, items wear out as they are used and not properly taken care of. Yeah, this can be considered rediculous, since what crappy sword is going to wear out in 3-12 months (gametime) when we have swords 500 years old that haven''t worn out. Well, most of those swords (the 500 year old ones) have only been used in a few battles and maybe one war, so it''s only seen 2-8 months wear and tear. Either way, 12 months is still too fast for a weapon to wear out. I''d suggest a chance for breakage instead.

2) Find ways to take money away from players. What do all characters want usually? More power, more abilities, more, more, more... How do they get this? Buy it. Make it to where they''re scraping to get by if they''re training. Sure, they might have 10 times what someone has at half their level, but they''re still scraping to get money up for that next training session or that next crafted item from an NPC (or PC) smith. Here''s a question: Why do people buy better food when they have the money? Because it tastes better? Because it''s better for them? Make food that costs more and gives bonuses to physical and mental stats. Yeah, you don''t want players to be able to take their stats too high from food/drink, but they''re not getting that food back after they eat it... make them spend more on it and make it one of the better ways to increase stats. If you don''t make there be something special food, people will just buy whatever food is cheapest over the long run, no matter the effect. Heck, even make the worst food take away from stats or have a chance of giving food poisoning. That would keep the higher level people away from the cheap stuff.

3) Just accept that everyone is going to get rich and make critters scale in power with the level of power of the players (offense/defense). If the average level is 40 and you want your critters in a certain dungeon to be x difficulty, at a certain level of power (offense/defense average of a certain level player), start increasing the power of those critters. So you want a critter to be pretty tough for a level 40 player and you balance it accordingly, you calculate that when the offense+defense average for 40th level players hits 1400, they will start getting more difficult, so long as they remain difficult for the ''average'' level 40 character. So some (untwinked) people will not be able to take the critter out at their level. This will create more work for the servers, but less for the designer in the long run. Why would this happen? The same reason that it happens to players, players are tougher, so why shouldn''t these monsters be too? They have the same money, they just are tougher, staying in line with their target ''audience''.

Those are just some thoughts.

I had a discussion about this with a few friends not too long ago. We agreed that the first step towards a balanced economy is to make it completely player driven. If done properly, a fully player driven economy should balance out in the long run. You need miners, smithers, armor makers, enchanters (to make items magical), fletchers, etc.

A system of degradible items (like SWG) will have to be put in place, as that creates both a maintanance-type job class and it forces players to buy new items (you can only fix something so many times).

Lastly, you have to make the best items (or at least most of the best items) player created. If you kill an Orc, you should get a "Crappy Piece of Sharpened Iron -2", not a "Holy Slayer of Doom +3" Monsters should carry crappy items unless they picked up good items off of some other player that they killed. If a dragon kills a high level character, it should be able to pick up some (probably not all) items from the dead character''s body.

Just a few thoughts we had, too bad we can''t make an MMORPG =(

Desert Fox

I agree that the "Best" stuff that a player should be able to get should be player made. I also think that a Dragon shouldn''t have crap though. Dragons should be rich (as opposed to the EQ dragons that have crappy cash loot) and should have a LOT of loot, some higher end, some lower end and completely random from a little +1 Sword up to the +17 Scythe of Death and the +12 Armor of Deflecting.

Yes, orcs should have -2 Rusty Sword of Quick Breakage and -1 Leather Armor of Mold. But this should be commensurate with their level and items should wear out in a time that is associative with their quality. Not saying that a +8 Sword should last any longer than a +6 Sword, just saying that if that +8 Sword is made by a master, but the +6 Sword is made by a grandmaster, the grandmaster probably tempered it better and it will last longer.

One thought though, as I''m thinking of the different ''+'' levels, why not have weapons downgrade with their quality level. You have a +8 Sword made by a moderate capability weaponsmith working with metals that were possibly over his head... it will become a +5 Sword faster than a +6 Sword made by a grandmaster working with a metal that he is well experienced with will drop down to +5. Sure, proper care of your weapon will mitigate that, but only so much, maybe alleviating 1/2 of the wear and tear (or more mattering on your ability to care for your weapon), but that grandmaster knows the tricks of tempering and making a weapon that will last, whereas the moderate ability smith will make mistakes that may not tell initially, but as the sword ages, it definitely will.

It will take more work on the part of the servers, but what else are we doing with these big, fat Dual 2+Ghz processor machines running Raid 5? Simply handle a little item management and another db work and you can do it easily. So you might need some more servers... it will make for a better game and much more need for the higher quality smiths, as opposed to the lower quality smiths.

Either way though, you''re going to end up with grandmaster smiths that can make nearly legendary weapons in their sleep and they will eventually become relatively commonplace, because of these weapon''s longevity. The only option you have then is to either make the critters tougher (as the player population becomes more powerful) or increase the breakage rate. It''s hard to justify a +22 Mithril Sword of Legend breaking at the same rate as the +6 Steel Sword of Lieutenants, the metal is nearly impervious to wear and tear.

There comes the debate though. Your playerbase will become more powerful as time goes on and there is nothing you can do about it. You do need to (as much as we hate it) make new areas for them to hunt in to keep the older areas for the ''n00bs''. As much as people hate Sony coming out with expansions ''just for the high level people'', the fact remains that there is little other choice for them. The player bases get higher level, they become more powerful, they make better stuff cheaply and they bring home the ''phat lewts''. No matter the game, it''s bound to happen that ''trickle down'' will invade any game. You can make weapons wear out faster with unskilled users, you can even break them, but when someone has a choice between keeping his +6 Sword (for no reason), selling it to a merchant (giving the player even MORE money... trying to avoid that) and passing it down to a lower level character that can advance FAST with the weapon, what do you think he''s going to do? So it breaks... no big deal for him... he''s not going to use it anyway.

What are your choices? Make some areas that are WAY beyond your players initially and will be for some time, so that they are struggling to get powerful enough to go there. Make them pay tariffs for going certain places (roads, where they can travel faster, into cities, etc...), make them pay for housing and upkeep, keeping stuff in the bank... it all comes down to choices. The players won''t like them. You won''t like half of them. Someone''s going to be unhappy either way, so who do you want it to be and how unhappy do you want to make them?

I think the fundamental problem is that the game is limited to the core kill-for-swag economy. You''re stuck on an escalator that only goes up.

A better solution is to give the players something else to do once they reach a certain level of wealth or power. Politics maybe. Let them buy themselves into the landed nobility and manage the affairs of peasants. Let them work to build a dynasty by trying to produce heirs; then let them play as the heirs who go adventuring. Let them start a religion, maybe. Let them manage some AI controlled bots that alter the landscape (building roads and what not) or perform some other tasks (building a dungeon, anyone?).

That way they have to continue to spend money on these other tasks, but aren''t directly rewarded with the acquisition of money.